


That damn lemon verbena...

by LivingInSmilesIsBetter (axm)



Category: Whiskey Cavalier (TV)
Genre: 1x02 The Czech List, F/M, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-06
Updated: 2019-03-06
Packaged: 2019-11-12 19:43:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,740
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18017210
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/axm/pseuds/LivingInSmilesIsBetter
Summary: Spoilers for the morgue sneak peak of 1x02: The Czech List.She could punch him. There was just enough room inside the body bag to ease her arm back a little and get him right in the nose – and she would be able to do it so smoothly no one except Will would ever know she had done it. The plastic of the bag wouldn’t even rustle...





	That damn lemon verbena...

**Author's Note:**

> Spoilers for the body bag morgue scene in 1x02 that was released as a sneak peek.  
> Lots of getting inside Frankie's head as I dip my toes into this fandom and start to explore these characters.  
> Hopefully the first fic of many. I'm feeling inspired.

Her mom had been her best friend. Her dad, tough but fair, had been so much like herself. And she had loved them both fiercely. As an only child, Frankie had been given all she could have asked for in this life – including a sophomore year abroad. Being separated from her parents had been difficult but knowing she would see them over Christmas break had been like a hallway light shining under the door into an otherwise dark bedroom. It had felt like security. It had kept her going even on the coldest European nights when her family were a world away.

But Christmas break never happened. November 5th happened instead.

She had been seated in a small café when the news came, when the soothing _tap, tap, tap_ of the light snow against the window was broken by the shrillness of her ring tone. Her frantic aunt on the other end, forming sentences that almost sounded like, ‘…surprise visit’, ‘….your parents were on the plane’, ‘….I think it crashed, oh God, Frankie...‘….airline’s telling me nothing’, ‘….airport, Frankie, go, please…’

She remembered the painfully slow drive to the airport as the cab driver navigated through the settling snow.  She would never forget the plastic chair in the Arrivals lounge, hard and cold and so painful against her back. And the snow piling deeper outside as the bitter wind blew. But planes were still landing, even if her parents' flight was delayed, and she was grateful for the seat when so many around her were standing.

The arrivals board hadn’t changed in an hour.

_Delayed_.

_Delayed_.

And then: the PA announcement. The surge of families like a tsunami of grief pushing towards any attended desk for more information. She moved with them. The world blurred around her. Her body was jostled by others and she barely kept her head above the crowd. Then the news conference. The official word.

Lost contact.

Off radar.

Crashed?

The questions: What was her name? Identification? 

Her answers: Broken and desperate.

And later: Explosion. Terrorist bombing. No survivors.

Night fell swiftly over the city and, when she exited the airport hours later, she left with a darkness around her so devoid of light she didn’t know what hope was anymore. Didn’t know what love was. What any emotion other than despair could feel like.

Nineteen-year-old Francesca Trowbridge felt something she had never experienced before: emptiness. It engulfed her, clawing out everything good in this world, everything good inside her, and left her unwilling to let herself go through such loss again.

So, the wall went up. Brick by brick she built it, high around her, steadfast like herself. No one could touch her heart. No one could break it.  
She remained safe inside herself for more than a decade. Allowing flings with no emotions, and nothing that ever went beyond a night or two. A lone wolf, she had maybe one person in this life she truly trusted, but no one she would call a partner.

Until Will Chase.

Will - I’m Just Going To Pour My Bleeding Heart All Over Your Life And Make It Messy - Chase, who was currently gesturing at the body bag he had just unzipped, looking way too pleased about his “better idea” on how to get the retinal scan.

Posing as a dead body to slip into the morgue wasn’t the worst idea he had ever had. No, that honor was about to be taken by the next words out of his mouth:

“We both need to get in.”

Because no matter how bad a day it had been it could always get worse.

Frankie almost laughed at how absurd it all was. “There is no version of me who gets into a body bag with you.” She stood opposite Will, the gurney with its red body bag and his suggestion heavy between them.

“Frankie, I need you.”

“Ever thought of using less emotional language?”

“That’s… not really me,” Will told her, shrugging midway through his reply to punctuate the sentence.  

“Yeah, no kidding.”

He sighed and hoisted himself up to sit on the edge of the gurney. Turning to face her, he reached out a hand, but the offer was rescinded when Frankie shook her head and pulled herself up on her own.  

“Ever thought of trusting someone for a change?” he retorted as he shuffled into the body bag.

Arms folded across her chest, watching as he lay down beside her, Frankie warned, “I’m not doing this if you’re going to talk the whole time.”

“You two done flirting over the corpse bag yet?” Standish asked, stopping at the end of the gurney, and looking proud of himself for the scrubs he had procured.

Throwing him a withering glare, Frankie slipped in beside Will, and then both glanced up at Standish as through their half-ass attempt at being one body would suffice.

“Yeah,” Standish said slowly, dragging out the word as he looked down at them. “This ain’t gonna work. You’re gonna need to… shuffle onto your sides. And closer,” he added with a hint of glee in his voice.

Frankie huffed out a long-suffering sigh. “I’ve killed people for less, you know.”

“Yeah, I know,” Standish replied. “Now… shuffle.”

They shuffled, albeit awkwardly. Will rolled onto his side and encroached into her space, while she maneuvered her own body more stiffly than someone in full rigor, until both lay with their noses almost touching, facing one another on the tiny slab.

“Much better,” Standish announced, satisfied with his work. “Now… play dead!” And with that he zipped the bag closed, silencing them before any more protests could be uttered.

 

It wasn’t as dark as Frankie had expected inside the bag. Light diffused through the plastic, casting an orange glow on Will’s empathetic face, highlighting his cheeks, outlining his lips, and burning in his irises until his eyes almost seemed amber.  
The gurney rolled along the linoleum hallway, with only the wheels breaking the silence with a soft, brief squeak on each rotation. Standish’s momentum as he pushed the gurney rocked her and Will, swaying them with a rhythm she didn’t know how to keep going outside of this morgue.  Their knees brushed once, and like magnets flipped the wrong way both kept the action from repeating. She was tense; Will was just being polite. She needed to relax--

But death wasn’t relaxed or calm. Death was something that was violent and abrupt, that tore children from parents and ripped hearts in half. Breathing in deeply, she held the air in her lungs for a beat and then exhaled slowly. In that moment she felt a calm wash through her. And it was in that moment Frankie realized she was staring openly into Will’s eyes.

She looked down, averting her gaze as casually as she could. It was a slow, controlled movement, and as she did, in the time it took to blink, her other senses became heightened. The heavy plastic above her, the cold slab beneath her - and the fruity scent wafting over her that could only be coming from Will.

“You smell nice.” The words flowed from her lips, because what else was there to talk about when you were mere inches from another human being? And since no foul odors emanated from Mr Sensitive, she may as well comment on how good he smelled before criticizing his personality? Sounded good, she decided, as she asked, “Citrus?” She kept her voice low, almost gentle. She pitied him. Working with him was not what she had had in mind when she had woken up a week ago and researched the man whose path would soon cross with hers. This was meant to be a one-time thing.

Now they were partners? Begrudgingly. And he _had_ dug part of her shirt out of her side and saved her from septicemia, as he had promised, so maybe trusting him was something she could work on.

There were a lot of things she could work on.

Like even just putting up with him for now.

Then his words filtered through. The hotel body wash. Lemon verbena.  
He was more of a girl than she was.

Putting up with someone that emotional was going to take all of her skills. How he got by, how he managed to do his job, confounded her. She could feel it creeping up on them, the icy tendrils of a mission gone wrong because Will Chase couldn’t separate his emotions from the case and one of them ended up dead.

For real.

Not just faking it in a body bag to slip into a morgue.

Proper dead.

Like her parents.

“Weird burn,” he replied after the “You’re too nice,” comment had left her mouth, and she’d had to collect herself because her mind had drifted. Again. A body bag, it seemed, could do that to a person.

“You’re too emotionally available.” And it’s going to destroy you, she added silently. ‘Whiskey Cavalier’? The name was ironic, right?

“I’m sorry,” he retorted. “I couldn’t hear you over the wall of mistrust you’ve built around yourself.”

She could punch him. There was just enough room inside the body bag to ease her arm back a little and get him right in the nose – and she would be able to do it so smoothly no one except Will would ever know she had done it. The plastic of the bag wouldn’t even rustle.

“It’s so big,” he finished as her fingers were clenching into a fist.

But Will would never know how close he came to a broken nose.

The metal teeth of the zipper separated, light engulfed them, and Standish’s unimpressed face loomed down on them.

Apologies left their lips after they were both chided for their talking, but Frankie’s mind was snagged on the wall Will had mentioned. Snagged, because he was right. It was there. Tall and solid and strong. It had been there since the death of her parents. An aegis forever protecting her heart.

Now – and God she hated to admit it – but maybe when he had stuck that knife into her side he had chipped one of the bricks. Maybe the amber glow in his eyes had melted a layer of concrete. Maybe that damn lemon verbena had weakened the very foundations holding the wall in place.

Maybe--

“Your fault,” Will mouthed at her for the telling off.

Yeah. No.  
Probably not.

 

 

 


End file.
